Starting with their founders, Apple believed in quality and Microsoft believed in quantity. That's where control of hardware matters.
MS hacked in backwards compatibility with old apps and hardware, whereas Apple transitioned hardware from Motorola to PPC to Intel to Apple Silicon with incredible, seamless emulation layers as bridges.
Post-Jobs, Apple isn't really the same. For all the "simplicity" of iOS, way too much is hidden from sight like "pull down or swipe to reveal search boxes, scroll bars", etc, settings are hidden, redundant, or impossible to figure out, text is impossible to select without a mouse or trackpad, things happen after a delay (WTF) and items move around, so I am playing whack a mole. A simple "paste" key or screen button would save hours of poking and waiting around. Half my clicks are by mistake, trying to scroll. (Pages finally adopted a "lock text" toggle to fix this, a small miracle that was a few minutes work to create in HyperCard), Command C and V are adjacent on keyboards and I always hit the wrong one. (Same for the pop up copy/paste on iOS ) But mainly, the upgrade cycle is too short ( to support each year's new phones) to do sufficient testing. And it's still better than windows. My non geek brother got so fed up with windows updates repeatedly breaking his device drivers that he's now happy with Ubuntu, bought from and supported by Dell.
Microsoft seems suspended somewhere between the past, because their life depended on bespoke apps, and their "all cloud, all AI" future. No doubt, they are too large to have any kind of focus like Apple has shown. And Apple has killed off both good and bad software products. The good being HyperCard and the bad being iTunes, now part of Finder, their second worst software product behind iTunes.
When MacOS turns further into iOS, especially with lockouts, I'll go back to Linux, which I have used on and off for a long time.
Quality at Apple is the ghost of Steve Jobs. Fragility and ugliness are the ghost of the (still living) Bill Gates. The present at both seems to be a bit of scrambled eggs as they try to create an elusive future less real visionaries on board.
> MS hacked in backwards compatibility with old apps and hardware, whereas Apple transitioned hardware from Motorola to PPC to Intel to Apple Silicon with incredible, seamless emulation layers as bridges.
Microsoft also has incredible seamless emulation layers, not for CPU differences, but for older technologies. I expect that Windows can still render bitmap fonts at least in some old applications, for example, while MacOS won’t.
The difference is that Apple tears down the bridges they build after a few years, hugely decreasing their maintenance burden. They don’t have to test compatibility of any 68k or PowerPC applications, for example, or apps using Carbon, try to have only one font layout engine on the system (I think they currently have that, but am not 100% sure), one html engine (again, I do not track things, but Microsoft likely has at least 2, one for the browser and one the ancient help system used in ancient applications) etc.
Well, I called it a hack rather than an emulation layer, and I am open to it being more formal than a patch every time the OS is upgraded. As you noted “I do not track” such things.
My HyperCard withdrawal has been alleviated in a way by an MacOS9 emulator that runs on the latest (as of Ventura) hardware and software, and which runs HyperCard. I just found it to be a great prototyping tool for GUI apps that passed messages between objects, quite different from straight procedural programming.
Sure, some business probably wouldn’t want to run a legacy app in an emulator of an earlier version of windows. So much legacy software out there.
Microsoft expended a huge amount of effort trying to get windows cross platform, with MIPS, Alpha and other versions of Windows NT.
They also created .NET and essentially forced it on all new development efforts.
It turns out that x86 stuck around way longer than anyone expected, AMD really helped when they came up with a good 64 but instruction set that extended things to the present.
It's sad that so much effort went into .NET, and it really wasn't necessary, in the end.
We'll likely end up using WASM instead for safe cross platform general purpose computing.
MS hacked in backwards compatibility with old apps and hardware, whereas Apple transitioned hardware from Motorola to PPC to Intel to Apple Silicon with incredible, seamless emulation layers as bridges.
Post-Jobs, Apple isn't really the same. For all the "simplicity" of iOS, way too much is hidden from sight like "pull down or swipe to reveal search boxes, scroll bars", etc, settings are hidden, redundant, or impossible to figure out, text is impossible to select without a mouse or trackpad, things happen after a delay (WTF) and items move around, so I am playing whack a mole. A simple "paste" key or screen button would save hours of poking and waiting around. Half my clicks are by mistake, trying to scroll. (Pages finally adopted a "lock text" toggle to fix this, a small miracle that was a few minutes work to create in HyperCard), Command C and V are adjacent on keyboards and I always hit the wrong one. (Same for the pop up copy/paste on iOS ) But mainly, the upgrade cycle is too short ( to support each year's new phones) to do sufficient testing. And it's still better than windows. My non geek brother got so fed up with windows updates repeatedly breaking his device drivers that he's now happy with Ubuntu, bought from and supported by Dell.
Microsoft seems suspended somewhere between the past, because their life depended on bespoke apps, and their "all cloud, all AI" future. No doubt, they are too large to have any kind of focus like Apple has shown. And Apple has killed off both good and bad software products. The good being HyperCard and the bad being iTunes, now part of Finder, their second worst software product behind iTunes.
When MacOS turns further into iOS, especially with lockouts, I'll go back to Linux, which I have used on and off for a long time.
Quality at Apple is the ghost of Steve Jobs. Fragility and ugliness are the ghost of the (still living) Bill Gates. The present at both seems to be a bit of scrambled eggs as they try to create an elusive future less real visionaries on board.
All IMO